More gadgetry tomfoolery!

Since I’ve gotten an iPhone and I’m somewhat old-fashioned in that I enjoy visiting individual blogs rather than using an aggregator, I’d noticed that some sites (particularly those hosted on WordPress.com) automatically detect that I’m browsing on an iPhone and then load a theme optimized for reading on that nifty little screen. I thought that was a great idea, so I’ve gone ahead and added that same default mobile theme/plugin used by WordPress, WPtouch. I’m very pleased with the results.

Desktop users aren’t going to see a difference, but if you’re one of those oddballs who visits sites individually (as opposed to using an RSS aggregator of some sort) on a mobile phone, you’ll notice a very nice, sleek, and user-friendly interface. No zooming required to read! The theme will work well with iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices, they say. Others will be hit or miss, I suppose. It looks very nice on my iPhone.

WPtouch is the free plugin version. I may actually go ahead and buy the fully-featured WPtouch Pro version from the authors, Brave New Code. It looks pretty spiffy.

If you’re using a mobile browser other than the iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre or BlackBerry Storm, please take a look and let me know how it looks. I’m curious as to how it might not work on other mobile readers than those mentioned by the authors as being compatible.

UPDATE 8:20 PM:
Nick Norelli asked for some screenshots of what this looks like on my iPhone (which is a very good idea I should have thought of, so thank you Nick!). Here they are!

First, here is an image of the home page of biblicalia with the new mobile theme on my iPhone:

Next is an image of the menu that appears when you click the down arrow to the right of the biblicalia blog title:

Here is an image of how the Categories look, which is the option next to the menu that you see when you click the down arrow:

Now back to the menu. Here’s what the Archives look like:

And here’s what the Links page looks like:

And last but not least here’s what Nick’s comment below looks like:

I may be making some cosmetic changes here and there, but I like the overall look already.

Oh, one more. This is an example of the default settings. Here’s what Esteban’s blog’s home looks like:

Oh, one oddball thing that I’m going to have to address is that for the Archive and Links to show in the WPtouch theme, you have to create a blank page for each. So, under the banner at the top of this page, you’ll see an Archive and Links links in the black menu bar, but the pages themselves are empty. I’ll take care of that soon. My archives and links are available through the right sidebar. I also want to take out that “Tag Cloud” item on the Archives page, since I don’t use tags at all.

Thanks back atcha! I’ve noticed that all the WordPress.com blogs pull that theme up automatically. Even yours does! (I’ve just sent you some screenshots.) But those of us with our own domains have to load these things up ourselves. I always thought it would be much more of a hassle, actually. Without something like this loaded, it would look on any web-enabled phone as the normal web page, but really small and illegible. Then you can zoom in, but that’s annoying. This is much nicer.

WPtouch Pro has a lot of enhancements over the WPtouch free version (both are GPL though). With regards to Kevin’s comments, you no longer have to make blank pages for Links or Archives in WPtouch Pro, as they are both supported as WPtouch page templates that can be activated in the admin panel. We plan to build more templates going forward (this is true of the photos template as well – you can simply click a checkbox in WPtouch Pro 2.0 and have your Flickr photos show up).

We’ve also done a ton of work making the menu better. You can disable items in WPtouch Pro and also have a full page hierarchy, something WPtouch doesn’t support. There’s also web-app mode (where you can save your site to the home screen and then launch it in a browser-less window like an iPhone app). To test it, visit http://www.bravenewcode.com, click the + at the bottom, save to home screen, and then launch it from the home screen.

So lots of big changes! It also supports full theming (for all devices, including the iPad).

Thanks for the comment, Duane! I really like the WPtouch Pro, which I’ve loaded here just a couple days ago. I’m looking forward to poking around and playing with themes. Not needing the blank Links, Archive, and Photo pages is a real plus. And the full menu support is really nice! I’ve loaded WPtouch on my church’s site, which has an extensive pages menu, and it works very nicely, indeed. We’ll be going through to clean up pages so they’re better looking in both formats.

Thank you and your co-authors very much for all the great work. It’s very easy to use, and quite fun to play with.